Using Hashtags (#) in Twitter – Wildcard Friday

By TimApril 2, 2010

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httpvhd://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4r07a7tGdjE

So what are hashtags? Hashtags (commonly known elsewhere as the pound sign) are used within social media communities, namely twitter, as a means to spread information…and organize information by creating thematic groupings. Basically, hashtags are used as a way to group similarly themed tweets together. You can use a hashtag directly in front of a keyword within your tweets to tell the twitter community that you have tweeted about a certain topic.

For example, if you’re tweeting about shoes….you can construct your tweet so that the twitter community at large knows you have something to say about shoes. An example of such a tweet may look something like this:

TwitterName: Good news! ShoeCompanyXYZ is offering $10 off all #shoes today.

Why use hashtags?

Using the hashtags within your tweets has a number of benefits. The two most prominent are:

Using hashtags allows your tweets to become more visible to the entire twitter community, not just your twitter followers. For example, your tweets will show up in the standard twitter search…. as well as search engines specifically designed to follow hashtags. Also, anyone that has signed up to follow a specific hashtag keyword will be fed your tweet automatically.

It’s a good way to grow your twitter following. More exposure for your tweets presents an opportunity to capture followers who are interested in the topic you’re tweeting about.

From a business perspective, these two benefits can be strategically managed to gain business exposure, promote new products, offer limited time deals, publicize an events and more.

How should you go about using hashtags?

You can create your own brand hashtags to try and create a following

You can randomly select keywords to use after your hashtags

You can capitalize on hot / trending hashtags by researching this data a hashtags.org

The golden rule: don’t be spammy!

People strongly dislike hashtag spamming, so in order to keep your brand name out of the muck, make sure your hashtag usage is relevant, and make sure you’re not using them in a spammy fashion.

That’s it for today’s video, I hope you found it useful. As a reminder, if you’d like to gain more insight into how Exclusive Concepts can help with your marketing efforts – give us a call at 1-800-504-4324 …we offer free audits to qualified businesses. Thanks again, and enjoy the weekend. Don’t forget to follow us on twitter as well at http://twitter.com/ExclusiveTweet